They were prompted bya tweet from Joe Dale this morning. I was eating breakfast when Joe tweeted that anchor, the podcasting app had some new features. One was particularly cool. Anchor allows you to reply to an audio wave with one of your own. The latest version of the app allows you to export a conversation as an audio file. This lends itself to asynchronous podcast creation.

I listened and responded to Joe’s anchor musing on the workflow he had described and about anchor from a sort of, fairly ignorant, indieweb perspective.

We waved back and forth a bit and Joe asked for more thoughts on indieweb. This is it.

The link to the idea of workflow comes from a post I made here about how to post audio to WordPress using the iOS app using Workflow. That post got a webmention from Henrik Carlsson’s blog. That is were I first heard the word microcast. He has an indieweb blog and webmentions are sort of indieweb trackbacks/ping back.

There are some basic indieweb ideas:

Your content is yours When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.

You are better connected Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone. Even replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place.

You are in control You can post anything you want, in any format you want, with no one monitoring you. In addition, you share simple readable links such as example.com/ideas. These links are permanent and will always work.

I guess the indieweb idea is the opposite, in some ways, of posting to a silo like Facebook or Anchor. These silos have their own affordances. They are easy to set up, often free and make things like having a conversation easy. To reply to Joe this morning all I had to do was click the reply button in the anchor app and talk. For Joe to reply to this he would have to post audio on a service that could send a trackback or webmention to this post. Listeners would have to follow links to hear the conversation.

On the other hand Anchor has a degree of lock-in. There is currently no RSS Feed for my waves. I can export them which is great but I can’t grab, as far as I know, all my content. I have to rely ontThe service staying around.

With this microcast I own the data, it is hosted at my own expense in my own space. It can be possed out. POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, is an indieweb principal.

A lot of the indieweb stuff is a little to technical for me but I think it is pointing to something important. Even if we use services like Facebook and anchor we should know what we are doing, what we gain and what we give up. A great post around the same space which is a lot easier to digest that the indiewebcamp is Doug Belshaw’s Working openly on the web: a manifesto.

A couple of weeks ago I mention Anchor and I’ve continued to play with that. Simon Thomson (@digisim) invited me to participate in a storytelling idea, folk just take turns to record the next short segment. It is only Simon and me at the moment but I am sure he would be happy to hear from others:

Back on the anchor beat I tried a few times to record a trafficjam anchor, I’ve not quite managed to make them loud enough yet or avoid running over but I did post this weeks review after I parked.

There are a lot of nice things about Anchor and it will be interesting to see where it goes. I think it is going to be one of those apps where you need pals on the same platform, at the moment the twitter search brings back very few folk for me. Hopefully this will grow, the anchor folk are intending to add an android app into the mix.

Looks like an interesting app for mobile audio. Ease of use and the ability to reply seem to be the features they are going for. Setup was largely audio, for instance you don’t type your name, you speak it.

Pasting the link to a piece of audio into WordPress here embeds it, via oEmbed I guess. I can’t see any sign of RSS yet. I’ve not found the documentation yet either. Seems to be iOS/iPhone only so far.

They do say:

Once published, conversations can be shared as podcasts, and heard all over the web.